The plastic bag has revolutionized product packaging at the industrial and consumer level. However, plastic bags present some problems when dispensed from their own packaging. Plastic bags are slippery to the touch and are generally hard to handle until something has been put into them. There is generally little friction between the walls of adjacent bags, making the bags difficult to maneuver and control when several are placed together.
One attempt to alleviate this problem has been to dispense the bags in the form of a roll. In the roll dispensing method, plastic bags are formed from a continuous tube of plastic. Heat seals and perforations at intervals form individual bags. When a bag is to be dispensed, the main portion of the bag is held and torn along the perforations that secure the bag to the remainder of the roll. This system is well known and found in the produce departments of many supermarkets. However, with this type of dispensing system, the plastic bag must be relatively thin and constructed of a plastic having a high resiliency and stretchability to enable the plastic to be slightly stretched as the roll is constructed in order to maintain a stable roll.
If the plastic bags are not rolled tightly, the roll tends to fall apart. This presents several problems to the consumer attempting to obtain a bag from such a roll. First, it is difficult to peel such a bag from the roll because the presence of static electricity and thinness of each layer make it difficult to lift the end of the roll away from the surface. Two hands are generally required to remove a bag from the roll, one to start a perforation tear and another to retain the next bag in the roll, allowing the first bag to be removed.
Another system used when large quantities of bags are required is simply a cardboard box containing many plastic bags stacked one over the other. The physical characteristics of the plastic generally make this system inconvenient in that the plastic bags settle during shipping and are hard to handle once the box has been opened because of the slippery nature of the plastic.
In order to alleviate this problem, bags have been assembled by bindings into pads, generally of 50-100 bags each. The bags are heat sealed together, and perforations are provided for separating one bag from the remainder of the pad. These pads are generally preferred to the single bag packaging system because the bags are more manageable. However, the pads cannot be assembled in a thickness much greater than 100 bags. This is an insufficient quantity for typical retail use and hence a multi-pad system is generally necessary.